AIX

Originally known as Advanced Interactive eXecutive, AIX is an operating system that is a derivative of UNIX and has been developed by IBM for computer equipment running on PowerPC and i86 processors, with notably strong support for security and fault tolerance. The i86 versions have been dropped and the company currently only offers the OS on PowerPC based workstations and server hardware although for a short while the Santa Cruz Operation sold a port of AIX running on Itanium hardware under the name Monterey Unix.

Currently AIX runs on hardware specifically designed by IBM to run AIX but also on System i server hardware, it can be run as a virtualised task on Z/OS mainframes and a few third party server and workstation manufacturers offer AIX compatible hardware as well, as it has carved out a niche as a high-availability alternative to popular open source UNIX clones.

AIX was notably the first OS to offer a journaling file system when it introduced JFS with AIX 3.1 in 1990, a mostly compatible but much improved and more portable version of the system was created for OS/2 in the latter half of the 90's and is known as JFS, that was then ported to to AIX and there called JFS2, with the older file system being renamed JFS1. For a time in the mid to late 90's lots of system and development software was either ported from AIX to OS/2, from OS/2 to AIX or developed for both systems at the same time.

Versions

• Current release: 7.2 (December 2015) - Adds live kernel replacement capability - Only works on Power 7 or higher processors.

Links

• PERLZ.org - A site run by Dr. Michael Perzl that has ports for host of open source software. This is the site that used to be known as "oss4aix.org"

See also

Category:AIX Tools